Qamar, 6 years old, has shown the photographer her notebook, pencil, and a sharpener. Three of her most valuable objects at this moment in her short life. She is Palestinian, attending first grade at a school funded by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in what remains of Gaza after the Israeli army’s invasion and indiscriminate killing. Writing, erasing, learning, she says, is what helps her keep going. Her face is one of the 10 portraits that make up the exhibition Gaza, where life resists, displayed in the grand lobby of the Thyssen Museum in Madrid.
The more than 2,000 people who pass through this space every day will have no choice but to look again, until June 14, at this territory which, as Raquel Martí, head of UNRWA in Spain, has explained, is in “a nominal ceasefire, not a real one.” Qamar survives, but since the supposed end of the war was declared, more than 800 people have been killed, according to data from this agency.
Next to Qamar is Mu’ayyad, 12 years old, who does not let go of the soccer ball. Hajja Rabin, 65, who has made a house with blankets where she has little privacy. Malak, 7, who keeps the flip-flops with which she fled the bombings. Sarah, 28, a UNRWA health worker, who has made her stethoscope the best prevention tool in a territory where more than a million people are crowded and infectious and respiratory diseases run rampant due to the Israeli authorities’ obstruction of humanitarian aid passage. “They allow more trucks for commerce than to assist the population,” Martí recounted, whose agency has calculated that about 100 vehicles pass daily when the agreement with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was for 600.
Each protagonist has therefore chosen personal objects that form “an inseparable composition between subject and object that highlights how everyday elements acquire extraordinary meaning in a context of devastation,” said Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the Thyssen.
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The photographer behind these images lives and works in Gaza but has preferred to remain anonymous, not signing them because, like his other colleagues, he is a military target of the Israeli army, like the rest of the population, since October 2023, when the bombings, forced displacement, and famine began. His silhouette, UNRWA reveals, is in Qamar’s gaze. One must approach the image, look deep into this girl’s eyes, and thus find this photojournalist.
This is the second time the Thyssen has organized an exhibition in collaboration with UNRWA to denounce through art the situation still faced by the Gaza population. “Last time, the extreme situation of the inhabitants under indiscriminate killing was described. At that time, the emphasis was on survival despite everything,” Solana explained. “After the alleged ceasefire, public and media attention has shifted elsewhere, but the occupation in the form of siege continues.”
The exhibition is part of the Cultura Viva X Palestina and UNRWA program, an initiative promoted by UNRWA Spain to support Palestine, held from May 18 to 23 with various activities in Madrid.
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